Sunday, April 16, 2006

Bad Mojo

Sooooo... it's been a week filled with rampant chaos and wanton destruction.

First, I noticed my smoke detector was making some odd chirping sounds. I took out the 9V backup battery and noticed it had slightly bulged at the end. Examining closer... it exploded in my face.

Yeah, that was neat. I set it down and attempted to wipe the chemicals burning into my flesh when it exploded again and launched a payload of alkaline across about 10' of wallspace. Greaaaat.

Speaking of batteries, my UPS started neither supplying power nor was it interruptable. The battery in my UPS was nearing the end of its warrantied lifespan, at which point evidentally it starts making a noise like a badger trying to claw its way out of a plastic trashcan. It also abruptly shut off all power to my home office e-mail/media/print/proxy server, rendering most of the stuff I need to do during the workweek useless. I spent most of two mornings in my bathrobe underneath my desk trying to get the freakin' thing to do a cold start, reset and come back to life. The battery is still dead, but at least now it's sending power. You'd think that despite a dead battery power would still flow to through the outlets at least, but alas that's not so. Great way to start a couple of mornings.

I also spent several late nights trying to update several Java application servers in a cluster... but after hacking into the wee hours of the morning one freaking application wouldn't start. I spent the majority of two days working on finding a solution. The problem? The hostname went from case-insensitive to case-sensitive. That's it. Dammit.